Commentary: Give Electoral College heave-ho

Thursday

Dec 1, 2016 at 4:00 AMDec 1, 2016 at 7:55 AM

I advocate the Popular Vote System because it reflects and represents the voice of the people. On any Election Day, your friends, tell you "Go vote, your vote counts." Does your vote really count ? How can anyone forget the presidential election of 2000, when Al Gore received more votes than George Bush in the popular vote?

By JOSEPH JACOB

I advocate the Popular Vote System because it reflects and represents the voice of the people. On any Election Day, your friends, tell you "Go vote, your vote counts." Does your vote really count ? How can anyone forget the presidential election of 2000, when Al Gore received more votes than George Bush in the popular vote?

Florida's disputed presidential election of 2000 should have been settled by the electorate and not decided by Kathleen Harris and United States Supreme Court. Schools and colleges give exams; if they discover cheating occurred, they schedule another test, they do not resort to the state to settle the cheating problem.

All of our elections, except the presidential elections, the winner is the one with the majority votes.

Then why don't we use the same principles for the presidential elections?

The Electoral College process originally drafted in 1787 and modified in 1804 with the ratification of the 12th Amendment and in 1961 with the ratification of the 23rd Amendment. In 1787, when the population was under 4 million, the electoral college was necessary. Now that the population is over 325 million, the popular vote system is genuinely democratic.

The framers of the Constitution gave voters in thinly scattered populated states more weight than voters in heavily populated states. The reason for that was to dilute the votes of population centers that may have different concerns from the majority of the country.

Direct vote would give everyone an equally weighted vote regardless of what state they live in and oppose giving greater voting power to voters in small states.

The Electoral College is an archaic system, less understood and befuddling, long overdue for reform, and should be replaced in favor with a system of direct election for the president and vice president by the pure popular vote.

Journalist Stephen Chapman recently wrote in his column, "Why would Cruz insult New Yorkers? ... Cruz doesn't care. He has no reason to care. That's because of a curious artifact known as the Electoral College. The fact that a major candidate is happy to write off so many Americans is just one more piece of evidence that this system is a bad way to elect a president- and that both parties ought to make it a priority to abolish it.

"Under the Electoral College, we don't have a national election for president. We have 50 state elections, and nearly every one of them is winner-take-all."

We are in the 21st century; we can not justify the existence of the Electoral College, an antiquated devise created to deprive the electorate of its power and make it impossible for a third-party candidate to mount a challenge to the major party candidates.

Let us vote directly to elect our president by the people for the people.

Joseph J. Jacob is a former controller for Hamilton Digital Controls, Inc., former president of the National Association of Accountants in the Mohawk Valley, former president of Upstate NY Regional Council of NAA and former national director of the NAA.